The present invention relates generally to methods and systems for managing and presenting multimedia content.
Since the advent of digital cameras and cell phones with built-in cameras, the management of media assets has become an integral aspect of our daily life. It is known in the art to approach systems for organizing and sharing our experiences saved digitally by focusing on the media assets that accompany these experiences. Under some systems users can upload media assets, such as digital photographs, video recordings, and textual comments into electronic mediums and share them with other users. However, these and other systems for managing and sharing media assets remain media-centric. This means that they organize their users' experiences along the media-type assets captured. However, the media-centric approach suffers from limits on the overall flexibility and applicability of these systems.
It is also known in the art for many applications in the field of media management to support only one type of media. For example, software such as ACDSee, Corel Photo Album, and Picasa focus on managing photos. Similarly, systems like YouTube and Google Video support video.
The prior art has also shown support for searching text, image, and video. Some examples include the search engine applications from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. These applications operate by searching for text, images, and videos separately. Thus, users must conduct independent searches to find different media and collate them as media-centric applications which lack a common indexing scheme.
Media-centric applications of the prior art have been used to decide the digital context of each media file considered independently. Many of these media management systems use a files and folders approach to organizing media data. Users of these systems organize, search, and browse back and forth through folders before viewing the media files. Some would consider this an inappropriate abstraction of the real world and human experiences as humans rather like to think in terms of events.
In a scenario where media assets are taken by different users at the same event, these assets share a common social context. For example, consider a group of people taking a trip together to New York. Each member of this group is individually taking photos during the trip and subsequently creating a photo album of the media assets. In a media-centric approach, one may struggle to combine the different users' photographs and experiences conveyed with the created photo albums. Important information about the social context is missing like the people that participated in the trip and the single events that happened during the trip.
Other applications may use tags to allow for searching through files, however, tags do not impose any structure on the organization and presentation of media, which limits their utility. In addition the multitude of tags can be considered individual folders making their use potentially more cumbersome. As users can search by tags, the resulting set contains images not only of that particular trip but of all images associated with the searched tags. Media organization systems have yet to focus on providing any support for unifying the common experiences of a group of users.
As can be seen, there is a need for an improved method and system for managing and presenting multimedia content employing an event-centric unified indexing of media independent of the media type.